Spotify's New Wear OS Brings Better Controls to Your Wrist
Spotify has announced that it’s launching a new Wear OS app over the next few weeks.
The new app will allow users to better control Spotify from their wrists; the previous app left so much to be desired that users were opting for third-party apps to try to control Spotify from their smart watch. Starting in November, the app will be auto-installed on new Fossil and Michael Kors smart watches.
Spotify’s new Wear OS app for Android Wear OS makes it easier to control your audio from your wrist.
The user interface remains pretty minimal, allowing users to pause or skip tracks (fast forward 15 seconds if you’re listening to a podcast). But, you can now “heart” songs to save them to your collection and access recently played playlists from the watch, certainly saving many a jogger from fumbling for their phone while jogging through the park.
The smart watch app also brings Spotify Connect functionality to your wrist, allowing you to easily hand off your audio to another device. Honestly, Spotify Connect is one of the coolest technologies out there (and it doesn’t get enough attention), so it’s great to see Spotify further pushing this tech.
This is also a great partnership for Google, who upgrades one of the most important functionalities – audio playback – to its Watch OS. With Apple attempting to push users to Apple Music and making it slightly more difficult to seamlessly use Spotify on its Apple Watch screen, this could be a slight leg up for the search giant.